The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party appears poised to win the ongoing Indian election. That’s cause for concern for the country’s Muslims and secularists.

Leader of India's Bharatiya Janata Party Narendra Modi will likely become the country's prime minister on Friday. If that happens, India's Muslims and secularists have something to worry about, writes Haroon Siddiqui.

India, a secular democracy with a sixth of the world’s population, is on the verge of dramatic change. Its election results are to be announced Friday. The left-of-centre Congress government is set be toppled, according to exit polls, and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party poised to win a plurality of seats — a prospect that scares many.

Besides its open anti-Muslim ideology, its leader Narendra Modi has been lifelong member of the party’s most militant wing. In 2002, as chief minister of the state of Gujarat, he presided over sectarian carnage in which more than 1,000 people were slaughtered, most of them Muslims. His refusal to recant since has only added to the dismay of Muslims and secularists.

Here are the views of three prominent Hindu secularists I have spoken to.

Manoj Mitta. A New Delhi-based journalist, he’s the author of The Fiction of Fact-Finding: Modi and Godhra. That’s the town in Gujarat where the 2002 trouble began. When a train carrying Hindu zealots returning from a pilgrimage stopped, some passengers clashed with a Muslim vendor on the platform and also harassed a Muslim girl. Neighbourhood Muslims attacked a coach, which caught fire, killing 59. That triggered widespread Hindu attacks on Muslims.

“The Godhra incident was used to justify post-Godhra violence where Muslims were targeted on a mass scale — with government complicity,” says Mitta. “Even in police firings, the majority who died were Muslims. Marauding mobs were given free rein — police looked the other way or helped the rioters.”

One particularly horrifying episode, he recalled, was “master-minded” by a member of Modi’s caucus, Maya Kodnani. She was charged with leading a mob that killed 100 people, including women and children. “Still, Modi named her to his cabinet in 2007, as minister of women and child welfare!” (In 2013, she was sentenced to 28 years, with the court calling her the “kingpin” of the carnage — “a black chapter in the history of Indian Constitution”).

Modi’s supporters argue that federal and state inquiries did not find him responsible — indeed, that a court gave him “a clean chit.”

Mitta dismisses the inquiries as “farcical. Modi was not even asked about the contradictions in his various statements.”

Still, the federal report did not exonerate him — it only concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to directly tie him to what transpired, says Mitta.

“Indians take a great deal of pride in India being a democracy but fact is that India is under-developed and it lacks the processes and institutions that uphold the rule of law.”

Harsh Mander. He was senior federal civil servant who resigned in protest against the 2002 tragedy. He has since emerged as a human-rights activist and author of, among others, Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre.

I met him in Delhi in January and spoke to him again Monday by phone.

“The riot had not been a riot but rather a brutal communal massacre, a crime against my country — a state-sponsored atrocity with complicity of politicians and my own colleagues. The acts of brutality were unprecedented.

“Modi had made sure that the state did not control the situation for a long time,” giving mobs the time to do what they were doing.

While Modi’s supporters are downplaying his role, his “own discourse until recently was one of barely suppressed triumphalism” about the event, says Mander. “It’d be very damaging if he becomes prime minister.”

Married to a Muslim, he is one of the founding members of Citizens for Justice and Peace, which launched dozens of court cases, including that of Kodnani.

“We’re still fighting 65 cases,” Dharker told me in Mumbai. “But we know we cannot get right up to Modi’s door — that way he’s protected, he did not give a direct order. You know how things are done for leaders.

“But at that time, he was also minister in charge of police and intelligence. How can he plead that he was helpless?”

What about the “clean chit” given him?

“It was a flawed process. The whole legal system in Gujarat is corrupted, either by money or prejudice. A lot of the judges themselves are pro-Hindutva (the BJP belief in the supremacy of Hindus).”

So, Modi has resonance among many Hindus?

“Yes, he has benefited from the fact that many Hindus like what he says about and does to Muslims. There are a lot of Hindus with very strong prejudices against Muslims. For them, 2002 was not a problem at all. In fact, for a large number of Hindus, it is seen as an asset.”

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